About 2,000 petitions await Supreme Court's return

The annual glut of appeals that accumulates throughout the summer must be whittled down by the justices' law clerks. Only the strongest cases survive.

..."Significant attention is paid to the (pauper) cases, which may present very important issues," says Joshua Civin, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and former law clerk for Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Such cases, he says, "can take time to think through and understand what's being presented."